Read my lips
Oct. 17th, 2005 07:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
threemonkeysDefinition of a manager. Someone who when told "it takes 9 months for a woman to make a baby" says "get 9 women and have it done in a month".
Well, our upper management didn't quite say that but it was just as sensible in relation to a task our team is responsible for. And the thing is, there is no particular reason why the task has to be done by the specified date. They just want it done then because that is what they plucked out of thin air as an arbitrary finishing date at the beginning of the year It does not matter that the overall schedule has been dictated by a number of other teams and each one of them took longer than they were scheduled to - the team at the end of the chain has to make up all the slack.
Sometimes you can speed up a task by throwing people and money at it. But when the task is a specialised one requiring knowledge and experience, there isn't much you can do about it. Maybe these guys should read The Mythical Man Month. Maybe they should just listen to what people tell them. Maybe they should believe what people tell them.
Well, our upper management didn't quite say that but it was just as sensible in relation to a task our team is responsible for. And the thing is, there is no particular reason why the task has to be done by the specified date. They just want it done then because that is what they plucked out of thin air as an arbitrary finishing date at the beginning of the year It does not matter that the overall schedule has been dictated by a number of other teams and each one of them took longer than they were scheduled to - the team at the end of the chain has to make up all the slack.
Sometimes you can speed up a task by throwing people and money at it. But when the task is a specialised one requiring knowledge and experience, there isn't much you can do about it. Maybe these guys should read The Mythical Man Month. Maybe they should just listen to what people tell them. Maybe they should believe what people tell them.